Every once in a while a new voice in cinema emerges with a stunning debut. A piece of filmmaking that unexpectedly takes the world by storm and pushes the medium forward. Blue Heron is that voice, with Sophy Romvari shattering our preconceived notions of movies can be and mean to audiences. Even more incredible is that she does it on a tried and true independent budget, made for practically nothing but packed with an evergreen longevity and new vision of the artform. Blue Heron is a poignant, moving story of family, struggle, and fractured memory, culminating in a profound examination of what we remember and how we remember those closest in our lives.
Familiar Themes Through Fractured Memory
Through the eyes of a child was a big theme in cinema in 2025, with multiple films all telling deeply rich stories through innocent and often untainted eyes even as the world around them is in disarray. My Father’s Shadow and The President’s Cake are both examples of this, and both films made my top 10 best films of 2025 list. But Blue Heron feels different. Romvari’s deconstruction of memory exalts its effectiveness above its comps and feels like a new way to tell a familiar story. Unreliable memories and family struggles aren’t new devices – Aftersun is probably the closest comparison – but it’s what Romvari does with these themes that leaves a tremendous, lasting impact.
Blue Heron masterfully balances the semi-autobiographical story of Romvari’s childhood with a reimagined lens, letting the film slowly display just how fragile and unreliable memory can be. Everything serves as a stand in for what may or may not have actually happened, and she chooses to filter it all through the youngest daughter of a tragedy stricken family. Sasha (Eylul Guven) is too young to understand the behavioral and mental struggles of her older brother that plagues her immigrant family, and possesses even less of an understanding of her parents and what they’re going through. Romvari brilliantly weaves these broken recalls into our own understanding of what is happening, never revealing more than she needs to but always giving us enough to put the pieces together.
Perspective Shifts Change Everything
Visually, it’s so smartly shot and captured, almost like a docu-drama in form and style. It seamlessly moves through familial struggles without any hand holding or sentimentality. Blue Heron looks and feels like someone found a box of old photos and videos in the attic and tries to remember what was happening when they were taken. Both narratively and visually, it blurs the line between fact and fiction, memory and event, timeline and perspective. It all shifts and merges like controlled chaos, the way a stream of memory consciousness would look like if it were projected onto the screen. Romvari never lets anything get away from her even at her film’s most audacious moments. You can feel her reflective nature and doubt of her own experiences, and Blue Heron serves as electric memory piece that plays with form and genre while remaining quiet and contained.
There’s a major perspective shift in the third that genuinely floored me. I almost missed it, and actually had to rewatch it to make sure I was following along with what was happening. Yet another example of how Blue Heron uses fractured memory to its advantage. That shift absolutely wrecked me, and gave me something I don’t think I’ve ever seen in this way before. Given the amount of films I watch every year, that’s saying a lot to find something new to show me. Blue Heron not only sticks the landing, but recontextualizes everything we’ve seen up until that point. It’s such a magnificent expression of grief and the burdens of the past, and how we choose to remember or forget them that serve as formative experiences in all of our lives.
Final Thoughts
Blue Heron is deeply personal but also widely universal in all the ways the best films should be. It’s beautiful and heartbreaking, reflective and devasting but also cathartic and resonant. These are kinds of the movies that make us, that ask us to look at our own lives, our own memories and our experiences and ask how they shaped who we are today. It asks us to reexamine the way things were – not to be nostalgic for the past but to better understand our own memories.
I was shaken and moved in the way only the best films can make you be and left with an unforgettable viewing experience that will surely stand the test of time. Blue Heron is without a doubt the best film of the year so far, and cements Sophy Romvari as filmmaker to watch.
Also, not really the point at all and completely inconsequential to Blue Heron as a film, but Amy Zimmer as adult Sasha may be the most beautiful woman to every grace the screen.
Rating: 10 out of 10
Blue Heron is now playing in limited theaters. You can watch the trailer below.
